


Action at a Distance

by ChalkHillBlue



Category: Holby City
Genre: F/F, Soul Bond, Tags may be added, happy ending I promise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 05:29:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8610574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChalkHillBlue/pseuds/ChalkHillBlue
Summary: In a world where soulbonds are relatively rare, medical science is still working on a full description of how they work. In a world where marks on one person's skin can be mirrored on another's you see some horrors in frontline medicine that go way beyond tacky matching tattoos. In a world where you might accidentally take the bullet that kills your own soulmate there are new ethical issues to being a soldier. (But in any world where Serena Campbell exists, Bernie Wolfe will do anything to protect her.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a slightly different take on the soulbond thing. The rules should hopefully become clear as the story progresses. It starts off a little dark, but by the end it's sunshine and rainbows. You'll be shocked and astounded by who turn out to be soulmates. (It's Berena. Of course it's Berena.)

* * *

 

I

Serena Campbell's attitude to soulbound patients was well-known. The snider people in the hospital - those who didn't know her well, or didn't like her much (and Raf loyally reckoned if you didn't like her it was unlikely that you knew her) - thought it was prejudice. Bigotry even. Raf knew better. AAU was a frontline department, and you couldn't work frontline medicine without seeing the absolute worst casualties that sympathetic-binary injuries could bring in.

Today's trauma case was no exception. Knife wounds were always a horror anyway. They didn't have the facilities to deal with them as Serena would like, and the funding for it wasn't forthcoming. But this woman - Rivka Amsel, 35, multiple lacerations - was bleeding out on their table from a wound that she hadn't seen coming because it wasn't her own skin that had been pierced. AAU got about three of these a year.

Her husband had been in a bar fight. The ambulance had brought him into the ED an hour ago to treat his wounds. It had been twenty more minutes before he remembered to throw his wallet to reception and point to the tell-tale cyan card with his wife's face on it. This was the part that had Serena spitting venom as she worked to sew the woman back together. He hadn't thought of her. He hadn't said. The poor woman had been sitting at home minding her own business when suddenly she'd borne the brunt of a knife attack ten miles away, and he'd left her bleeding to death on their kitchen floor and _never even said._

Raf made a half-hearted attempt to stem the tide of her rage:

"He says he didn't know he could do it, Serena. He says it's never happened between them before - not full on sympathetic injuries. He didn't know what was happening."

Serena snorted in absolute derision.

"Yes. He would say that, wouldn't he? Meanwhile his wife bleeds to death while he - I shouldn't wonder - is having a fine old time enjoying the pain-relief of her morphine without any of the risk that comes with it. That's true love right there, isn't it? Clamp."

"Serena, you can't be sure-"

But his boss was in full flight now and barely listening.

"Do you know what _really_ kills me, Mr Di Lucca?" (Raf suspected he did.) "It's that we'll save her - and I _will_ save her - and ten to one it'll be on Holby News at bloody Six as a story about how love conquers death. Yet again."

Raf gave up. In truth he knew he'd be a hypocrite to say anything. Because it was all true. Your romantic notions didn't stand up long once you'd watched a woman die from wounds passed over to her body from the person who was supposed to love her. And it was mostly women, he had to acknowledge. Not exclusively. Not always. But mostly.

The last time they'd lost one on the table - only a little over a month ago: 2016 was excelling itself statistically on this one too - he'd gone home and had a chat with Evie. One of _those_ chats. If you find a boy whose skin is sympathetic with your skin keep your guard up. Don't let him know until you're sure you can trust him. And don't agree to anything - _anything_ \- that you could regret later on. Stay safe. Tell somebody you trust. Stay in your own skin. All the usual clichés. Evie had looked at him like he was mad.

"Uncle Raf, do you even know anybody who's SB?"

"We get soulbonds-"

"You shouldn't call it that."

"Sorry." Raf sometimes felt like keeping on top of their own PR terms and keeping on top of preteen jargon was like rubbing his stomach while patting his head. "We get people who are _SB_ on our operating table repeatedly. You know that."

Evie just shrugged.

"Yeah," she said. "But I mean, like, in real life."

Because to Evie the horrors of trauma calls weren't real life. They were just Dad's and Raf's work. And maybe it was better that way. Was a little innocence really any harm? So Raf let the matter drop.

Now as he watched Serena work - hands like lightning and tongue lashing out just as fast in rage against the situation - he wondered if he should try again. He couldn't bear to think of Evie going through something like this. No matter how improbable, no matter how low the statistics. Something they told you was perfect love should never hurt like this.

\---

It was almost lunchtime when their patient was finally stable enough to be moved up to Keller for further surgery. Serena slumped exhausted on the bench in the locker room as she pulled herself back together.

In a minute she'd get changed and face the universe. In a minute she'd do the paperwork. Just another minute, please and thank you. After that she'd have to go and talk to Guy Self - and what a joy _that_ would be. Guy always wanted to know every last piece of minutiae about any SBI, no matter how irrelevant it seemed. Only after he'd interrogated her about every stage of the operation would he approach her patient (and her patient's despicable husband) and ask permission to crack open their heads so he could poke about in them.

It was truly, flabbergastingly impressive how often people agreed to this. He never would tell her how he convinced them - only that it was all signed off with Hanssen and the ethics committees, don't worry your little head, Serena.

Serena had her suspicions about Guy's own past, but they were only suspicions. And she had to admit - if grudgingly - that if his centre came through for them with half the things he'd promised it would be a stupendous boon to Holby and to medical research. She wanted that, really. She _liked_ progress and reform for the benefit of patients. She knew full well the importance of money and prestige for greasing the wheels of good medicine. It was just Guy Self's smug face she had an objection to.

To top it all off, she seemed to have picked up an allergy to something. Had she changed her detergent lately? She couldn't remember right now. Truth be told, she'd be hard-pressed to remember what date it was, or where she'd left her car, or what she'd had for dinner last night just at this moment. Whatever it was, she had some kind of rash on her upper arm where her sleeve rubbed. She craned her head to examine it, then twisted her arm towards the mirror. Nothing worrying, just a slight redness.

It felt for all the world like sunburn.

\--

Five thousand miles away in Kabul, Major Berenice Wolfe was watching the sun go down and thinking about gardening centres. She was worried that she was going soft on them, and this was a problem.

She took another gulp of her coffee and frowned at the ground. As the evening grew darker the day - which had been unusually warm - was growing more chill and Bernie decided that any minute now she was going to get up and pull on her jacket over her scrub top. Any minute.

Instead she thought about poinsettias. Ordinarily, the very thought of poinsettias and their forced Christmassy captivity was enough to make her stomach drop into her boots. Today she found herself wondering if they came in colours other than red, and whether that might not be pretty.

Fuck. This was bad.

Bernie was not the sort of person who would ever explain the gardening centre problem. It wasn't even a certainty that she _could_ explain it to herself and she certainly _wouldn't_ ever think of telling anybody else about it. But if she had tried, the idea might have gone something like this: Bernie was a trauma surgeon on the front lines of combat. That meant that when the bullets were flying or the bombs were falling you grabbed your kit and you ran forwards, not backwards. You ran towards the fallen and in order to do that you had to be - on some level - okay with the possibility that you might die. And nine times out of ten, you were. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred maybe even.

This part was not something that she'd ever have to explain to other army medics and she couldn't imagine even trying to tell anyone else. You either knew or you didn't.

Anyway the problem was that other time. The one in ten. The one in a hundred. Whatever. Some days the training just wasn't quite enough. Maybe you weren't meant to be on shift that day and you were feeling bloody-minded about it. Maybe you'd just missed your daughter's birthday and Marcus had told you Charlotte hadn't even asked for you. (That should be okay. You shouldn't want your daughter to be upset. Pick up your kit.) Whatever the reason, sometimes you needed that extra kick.

For Bernie the kick was garden centres. Sure, she'd tell herself, you might be about to have your legs blown off by hidden mines. But at least you're not spending Sunday at a garden centre, eh? At least you're not going back week after week to squabble with your husband about whether it's to be the acer or the ficus for the patio. At least you just remember Anna and Harold Dunn having that exact row and don't, in fact, know what either of those things is yourself.

For as long as she could remember garden centres had been Bernie's guilty shorthand for the life she didn't want. And poinsettia's were shorthand for garden centres.

But lately - just lately - she seemed to have lost her venom. Mightn't it be nice, she thought, to plant a garden? Mightn't it be nice to think about colours and blooms and to plan for different seasons? Mightn't it even be nice to share these decisions if it was with somebody who - well, somebody who could make you care about any of it?

Bernie knew somehow this had to be about Alex. Alex, after all, had changed everything. These past months her whole world had tipped off kilter. Maybe it was inevitable that this would happen too. And yet it wasn't as though she was dreaming of some kind of perfect domesticity with Alex. That thought was as outlandish as any idea she'd ever had.

But something in her felt different. As though there was a new path outside herself. Something just on the edge of her hearing or on the tip of her tongue. She couldn't put words on it any more than she could have explained about the poinsettias though.

It was time to go in. She'd been sitting still for too long. In Kabul, even in January, there was always more sun than she expected.


End file.
